How do we feel about raiding wikipedia for device descriptions?

Question

I've been looking at a lot of the device tags, and creating wikis for many of them. I tend to point to Wikipedia for phone specs because it's pretty comprehensive. The HTC Desire page was somewhat confusing and I was curious about whether there are any synonyms floating around, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.

The text is pretty much a direct quote. Our tag wiki excerpt:

The HTC Desire (codenamed Bravo) is a smartphone developed by the HTC Corporation, announced on 16 February 2010 and released in Europe and Australia in the second quarter of the same year. The HTC Desire currently runs the Android operating system, version 2.2 "Froyo, although it shipped with v2.1 (Eclair).

Android, version 2.3 "Gingerbread" update expected in May or June 2011. Internally it bears a strong resemblance to the Nexus One, but differs in some features.

and the device's wikipedia page:

The HTC Desire (codenamed Bravo)2 is a smartphone developed by the HTC Corporation, announced on 16 February 2010 and released in Europe and Australia in the second quarter of the same year. The HTC Desire runs the Android operating system, version 2.2 "Froyo". Android, version 2.3 "Gingerbread" update coming in May or June 2011. Internally it bears a strong resemblance to the Nexus One, but differs in some features.

It seems to me that the Wikipedia community is doing a pretty good job about maintaining comprehensive specs on Android devices and has higher standards for citing sources, etc, and we ought to just point to them rather than lifting a snapshot of Wikipedia's content without any commitment to maintaining our parallel page. At a minimum, though, plagiarizing Wikipedia is still plagiarism and a violation of the attribution terms of their license.

Answer 1

Per

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/03/redesigned-tags-page/

Avoid generically defining the concept behind a tag, unless it is highly specialized. The “email” tag, for example, does not need to explain what email is. I think we can safely assume most internet users know what email is; there’s no value in a boilerplate explanation of email to anyone.

Generally, you want to tailor the definitions to your community -- and also, critically, provide guidance on when to use the tag.

Answer 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

Reusers' rights and obligations

The only Wikipedia content you should contact the Wikimedia Foundation about is the trademarked Wikipedia/Wikimedia logos, which are not freely usable without permission ([...] see Wikipedia:Contact us). If you want to use other Wikipedia materials in your own books/articles/websites or other publications, you can do so, unless it is used under the non-free content provisions—but only in compliance with the licensing terms. Please follow the guidelines below:

Re-use of text

Attribution

To re-distribute text on Wikipedia in any form, provide credit to the authors either by including a) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the page or pages you are re-using, b) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.) This applies to text developed by the Wikipedia community. Text from external sources may attach additional attribution requirements to the work, which should be indicated on an article's face or on its talk page. For example, a page may have a banner or other notation indicating that some or all of its content was originally published somewhere else. Where such notations are visible in the page itself, they should generally be preserved by re-users.

Copyleft/Share Alike

If you make modifications or additions to the page you re-use, you must license them under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 or later.

Indicate changes

If you make modifications or additions, you must indicate in a reasonable fashion that the original work has been modified. If you are re-using the page in a wiki, for example, indicating this in the page history is sufficient.

Licensing notice

Each copy or modified version that you distribute must include a licensing notice stating that the work is released under CC-BY-SA and either a) a hyperlink or URL to the text of the license or b) a copy of the license. For this purpose, a suitable URL is: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ For further information, please refer to the legal code of the CC-BY-SA License.

In sum, we should link to the Wikipedia page and the CC-BY-SA licence. I am assuming that SE's licencing is sufficient for the copyleft requirement.

As for whether we should use Wikipedia, I think it's a great starting point if the wiki article is good. If users want to improve upon that, great! If not, it's much better than nothing. I wouldn't say they're doing a good job of providing accurate information, though. Most of it usually comes from some enthusiast when the device is announced and/or released, with errors and outdated information living on.